Got a burning question you want an answer to and didn’t quite get it addressed during the day?

This fishbowl-style conversation brings a select group of the day’s speakers and other invited Industry leaders to the stage to answer your questions about the what, why and how of business agility. This is your opportunity to explore vexing questions about business agility with our panelists.

Here’s how it works:

• You submit your questions to our volunteers during the conference.
• We'll curate and short-list a few questions
• Each question will be asked to the panelists and then discussed for 5 minutes.
• After that, the audience votes on whether to continue the conversation for a few more minutes or move on.

This is a session where you are in control. Also, this will be run as a fishbowl, which means anyone from the audience can join the panel if they want to contribute.

Come ready to ask hard questions and get practical, actionable answers to your toughest questions.

In a way, pair programming is like riding a bicycle. You could read a book about it, you could watch videos of other people doing it, but you can only really learn it by doing it.

This workshop not only gives people a chance to experience pair programming, but to examine that experience in depth and see how their practice can be improved.

The “promiscuous pairing” technique is used, followed by an extended feedback session where participants analyse the strengths of pairing, and look at how they can improve their interactions with their colleagues.

Brings observability to the microservice architecture on Kubernetes

Microservices and containers have changed application design and deployment patterns. They’ve also brought with them some new challenges, such as service discovery, routing, failure handling, distributed tracing, circuit breaker, retry logic and visibility (monitoring) to microservices.

Kubernetes can handle multiple container-based workloads, including microservices, but when it comes to more sophisticated features like traffic management, failure handling, and resiliency, it leaves a lot to be desired. Most importantly, we want to do all this without changing the application code.

Service mesh architecture was created to handle these requirements. Istio is a service mesh created through a collaboration between IBM, Google and Lyft.

In this talk we will talk about the need of a service mesh, and what Istio brings to the table. We will also give a short demonstration of Istio in Kubernetes.

We like to say that agile teams own their own process by choosing their way of working, their “WoW.” This of course is easier said than done because there are several aspects to WoW. First, our team needs to know how to choose the appropriate lifecycle for the situation that we face. Should we take a Scrum-based approach, a lean/Kanban-based approach, a continuous delivery approach, or an exploratory/lean startup approach? Second, what practices should the team adopt? How do they fit together? When should we apply them? Third, what artifacts should the team create? When should they be created? To what level of detail? Finally, how do we evolve our WoW as we experiment and learn?

There are several strategies that we could choose to follow when we tailor and evolve our WoW. One approach is to bootstrap our WoW, to figure it out on our own. This works, but it is a very slow and expensive strategy in practice. Another approach is to hire an agile coach, but sadly in practice the majority of coaches seem to be like professors who are only a chapter or two ahead of their students. Or we could take a more disciplined, streamlined approach and leverage the experiences of the thousands of teams who have already struggled through the very issues that our team currently faces. In this talk you’ll discover how to develop your WoW without starting from scratch and without having to rely on the limited experience and knowledge of “agile coaches.”

More asking, less telling. As an agile leader, adopt the approach of humble enquiry to build relationships, increase trust and collaboration, and deal with the challenges of organizational transformations.

"Humble enquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person." - Edgar H. Schein

Working in an agile way asks us to rethink how we relate to each other as we tackle complex problems and challenge the traditional structures of our organizations. Humble enquiry - the art of asking instead of telling - is a critical skill for agilists who seek to improve collaboration and address difficult problems head on. Inspired by Edgar H. Schein's book 'Humble Enquiry, this workshop will teach you the fundamentals of how to do more asking and less telling. Through mini-lectures and interactive exercises, we'll discuss the different types of questioning, consider the forces around and within us that inhibit our ability to ask instead of tell, and examine how this powerful technique can improve collaboration within agile teams as well as help to address some of the challenges of agile transformations.

Five people at one computer? How can that possibly be productive?

While this seems like a reasonable question, it's not easily answered - until we begin to understand the power of flow.

Mob Programming grew from the quest of one team to learn how to work well together. Once we started We almost immediately noticed that working this way provided better results in a variety of ways:

• We were getting more done, and they were the more important thing
• The quality of our work was increasing dramatically
• Our Knowledge, skills, and capabilities were improving rapidly
• And all while we were having a lot of fun as well!

While we noticed these benefits and more, and it was clear this was in a large part due to working well together throughout the day - we didn't have an understanding of why this was working so wonderfully for us.

A hint came early on when we recognized we were achieving a one-piece flow - but we didn't realize the importance of this until we started exploring the meaning and power of "flow".

In this presentation, we'll share the results of that exploration, and see if we can get a better understanding of Mob Programming and the power of flow.

Agile Coaching is a relatively new discipline and there is a lot of misunderstanding about why coaching is useful, what skills and competencies an agile coach needs to have, how they engage with individuals, teams and organisations and how to tell good coaches from mediocre ones.

As someone who wants to become a coach, what skills and competencies do you need to build? There are training courses, but they are not enough. Becoming an effective coach requires much more than book knowledge, it needs deliberate practice and experience working with individuals and teams.

As someone who is considering engaging a coach, what should you look out for and how do you establish the relationship to ensure the best possible outcomes. How do you create the environment where we can grow your own coaches inside an organisation, what is the pathway to competency for an aspiring coach?

In this talk Shane explores these topics and relates it to his own journey to becoming a recognized expert coach through a competency-based assessment (ICE-AC).

After 20 years since the manifesto, the latest state of agile reports more than 80% of organizations as "still maturing" in their agile practice. As agile methods expand beyond small teams and software itself, we are still struggling to answer these questions:

• Why is it that some teams are more 'agile' than others even though they all claim to be practicing agile methods?
• What all dimensions need to change as teams, managers, and entire organizations attempt to become agile?
• How do these dimensions interact with each other?
• Overall, what does it take to become agile and how does that differ from doing agile?

This talk is based on my original theory of becoming agile developed from 10+ years of industrial research of agile practice in New Zealand and India, which received the distinguished paper award at the IEEE/ACM international conference on software engineering (ICSE), in 2017.

In this session, I will explain the key dimensions that need to transition during agile transformations, using industrial examples, and highlight what you can do to progress beyond simply doing agile, to harness the most from your agile transformations.

This keynote will add a unique research perspective to the conference program, sharing agile research in an industry-friendly format and delivery style.

Ever wondered why some people prefer to work alone? Or why some people cringe when pair programming is mentioned? It might be that that person, like me, is an introvert. But is is really that simple? Can we really put every person in a box labeled "introvert" or "extrovert" or are we all just ambiverts?

During this session I will talk about introverts, extroverts and everything in between.
Drawing from almost 15 years of personal experience being an introvert on agile teams I will talk about the differences of being an extrovert
or an introvert, how to foster an inclusive team environment, and the importance of psychological safety.
You will hopefully leave this session better fit to help EVERYONE on your team to reach their full potential!

There are many suggestions dealing with Agile-friendly performance appraisals, which promise to rely on trust, honesty, respect, safety, and servant leadership. The Agile Manifesto does not address performance appraisal although it does generally mention regular and frequent feedback, which can also be applied to performance evaluation. Two related methods, Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy, offer interesting approaches to agile performance review. In this session we want to present these two different performance appraisal approaches, how they're are supported by the values of BOSSA nova (short for Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agile) and want to invite the participants of this workshop to discuss the synthesis of the two approaches.

This session looks at several real-world examples from actual companies including Accenture, Equinor, and Google.

The first principle of Beyond Budgeting asks to “engage and inspire people around bold and noble causes; not around short-term financial targets,” the eleventh principle advocates: “Evaluate performance holistically and with peer feedback for learning and development; not based on measurement only and not for rewards only.” Thus, the main strategy of Beyond Budgeting is to separate (financial) bonuses from performance evaluation and to use relative and not fixed targets as a foundation for the evaluation.

Sociocracy suggests holding 360 degree in-person meetings. The person being reviewed should request it when needed, not just on a rigid annual basis, and perhaps not just once in the year. In the 360 degree meeting, the organization itself can be critiqued in the review - “the way we organize is causing performance problems.” Similar to Beyond Budgeting there is a focus on the vision and mission of the specific department as well as the overall company as a source of inspiration and motivation. The output of the performance review meeting should be a development plan that the immediate group of supervision, peers, and subordinates consent to.

Based on BOSSA nova, we invite participants to dive into what Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy combined offer for performance appraisals. Participants will take away insights that they can use in their organizations.

DevOps and continuous delivery is typically elaborated technically - what kind of tools, technologies, or skills are necessary for being able to deliver continuously. Often it is forgotten that continuous delivery requires also a culture change - in development, operations, marketing, sales, and not least for the customer.

This can be recognized for example, that although it is technically possible for a team to deliver continuously, but it seems that this delivery isn't welcomed. This means the actual system will not be directly used.

Therefore, in this session by taking into account the necessary cultural change, I want to answer the question how to implement continuous delivery successfully and what kind of pitfalls you need to be aware of when doing so.

We live in a world of "getting to yes" or "a positive no"
Yet the world is no black & white.
I live in a world of options. I like to say yes to all the options and only decide about an option at the last responsible moment. In this talk we will teach you to do the same.

Real options is one of these agile tidbits that is applicable to all aspects of life.
- a real option has a value
- a real option expires
- a real option has a cost

In this talk we will give you examples that will teach you how to apply real options to your life and projects.

Today success comes from building products people love, creating loyal customers and serving the broader stakeholder community. In this thoughtful exploration on the future of work, the authors explore the past, present and future of the “project”. And why, in today’s fast changing & hyper-competitive world, running a temporary endeavour is the wrong approach to building sustainable products and how #noprojects is fundamentally changing the way companies work.

The metrics by which we have historically defined success are no longer applicable and we need to re-examine the way value is delivered in the new economy. This book starts from the premise that our goal is to create value, for the customer, for the organisation and for society as a whole and shows how to empower and optimise our teams to achieve this.

The authors draw on modern management approaches to provide proven techniques and tools for producing, and sustaining, creative products that go beyond “meeting requirements”. By creating teams who are accountable for business outcomes, engineering for customer delight, and creating value for all stakeholders - profitability, customer satisfaction and employee engagement are all increased.

This book is far more than just a catalogue of practices and tools which you can apply in your product development. It contains inspirational stories from individuals, teams and organisations who have switched to this new way of thinking and working. It exposes the risks on the pathway and how others have overcome these obstacles

Make your training classes engaging and ensure the learning sticks!

Drawing on Sharon Bowman’s best-selling books Training from the BACK of the Room and Using Brain Science to Make Training Stick, this two-day program explores how the human brain really learns, which is very different from traditional assumptions about learning.

Join this class to experience the most current “cognitive neuroscience” about effective instruction.

Collaborative organisational culture doesn't just happen, it needs conscious and deliberate design and careful nurturing. In this workshop participants will explore what a collaborative organisation culture is, why it matters and how to deliberately design culture.

Culture is "the way we do things here" rather than anything written or prescribed, so understanding how leadership attitudes and behaviors influence and create organisation culture is vitally important to successfully establishing an environment where people are able to bring their whole selves to work, are engaged and positively contribute to the organisation's success.

This session is presented as series of facilitated conversations drawing out the key aspects of organisation culture and showing how it is influenced by a wide variety of factors including structure, geography, promotion policies and practices, the conversations leaders have, what gets rewarded, ignored or punished, relationships and friendships and a wide variety of other factors.

The agile manifesto was created in 2001. That is (when I write this) 17 years ago, (when the conference takes place 18 years ago.

At age 18, adult life begins. At 18 we think we know it all. Life is easy. Yet we quickly find out that easy, isn't always simple. Yves has gathered tips from many agile friends that are working in the trenches. Tips that will help your agile life.

Remote work is a hot topic and for good reasons! It has many benefits, but it also introduces new challenges. In this talk, we will look at how the Trello team embraced remote and made it work for its growing team. We will discuss why remote work can be good for your team and how to continue to get sh*t done and grow a remote culture. After this talk you will have a clear overview on why remote work can help your organisation, the challenges involved, and many pointers for getting it right.

agile, devops is all about repeatable, predictable good behaviors.
Individuals have habits, teams and companies have routines.

This talk is based on a famous book about creating habits. I took what I learned from the book, and mixed this with agile ideas about teamwork.

If you have a bad habit you want to change? ==> Come to this session.
If you don't have habits and want to learn how to create good habits? ==> Come to this session.
If you want to understand what is the value of habits? ==> Come to this session.

The “Agile mindset” was introduced to the software development community in 2001 in an attempt to foster freedom in the way that we work together. Its intent was to encourage organizational change that focused on people, collaboration and culture.

But words on a screen don’t mean much in practice, especially if the people using them don’t - or won’t- understand their intent. How can individuals, teams and companies learn to correct these mistakes and break free from the challenges associated with change?

Jen will share practical advice on effective Project Management, Agile Transformation, and getting things done– all told through the stories of her own journey towards something better at Red Hat.

In past few years, it has become quite common for software development teams to be distributed across time-zones and comprise of multiple vendors with 50-100+ people.

Agile practices encourage in-person interactions to foster collaboration, whereas, distributed and large teams force communication into the opposite direction. Therefore, it is important to achieve agility albeit with different, or modified mechanics, that work well for distributed and large team.

In this talk I am going to share talk about ways of working effectively in distribute teams with examples from real projects and tools and techniques for achieving great results.